Dealer Discounts on EVs

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Who farted?!

Okay, this is weird. Not that I’m complaining, since I’ve always
wanted superhuman powers. Unexpectedly, with an electric vehicle as my
trusty sidekick, this once-childhood dream is becoming a reality.

I mentioned in a previous rant that
my hearing has improved dramatically; I can now hear faint sounds
while driving my Focus Electric that I’ve never heard before while
driving any other car. You know, like the Bionic Woman, except that I’m a
man. Sure, the logical explanation for this phenomena is that an
electric vehicle doesn’t have a noisy engine to mask out those faint
sounds. So my hearing is probably still permanently damaged from too
many rock concerts and one incredibly loud Fender Mustang played through
an amp turned up to 11.

If it was just one of my six senses sharpening up, I’d succumb to the
logical explanation and leave it at that. But my sense of smell also
improves when driving the FFE. Sometimes, with this particular
superhuman power, I can actually smell what goes on inside of cars
around me. For instance, this past Monday morning I picked up a slight
stench of cigarette smoke while crawling southbound in the 405 HOV lane.
The stench grew stronger as I inched up to a black LeSabre with the
driver’s window rolled down. It reached maximum putridity when we were
wheel-to-wheel, then fortunately faded away as I slowly pulled ahead.
All this while my windows were rolled up, fan on its lowest setting.
Funny thing was that the guy in the LeSabre wasn’t even smoking, as far
as I could tell. Apparently the car just stunk of it.

On another recent commute I’ve smelled an alluring perfume while
moseying past an older but very well-maintained 325 convertible, driven
by an equally well-maintained woman in her thirties. I’ve also picked up
the distinct smell of gear oil, 75w90 by my calculation, as I
approached and passed an early-1990s Silverado. Perhaps he just changed
his diff oil and didn’t do a good job of cleaning up. And get this – on
the way home yesterday, going north on the 405 toward Sunset Boulevard,
somebody somewhere was smoking a joint. Which was uncanny, since there
wasn’t a single VW Microbus in sight. I switched lanes and saw a new white
Prius hybrid with the sunroof and rear window cracked open. Looked
suspicious, so I pulled up next to it, and sure enough, the dude was
toking away. Unbelievable.

I’ve also picked up new scents while at speed that I’ve never noticed
before. No matter which car I drive on my commute on the 405, I can
always count on catching a whiff of the Budweiser beer factory, then ten
minutes later, getting hit by the rotting stench of, well, something
rotting, somewhere near the Sepulveda dam. But when I drive the Focus
Electric, I can also smell other pleasantries emanating from
establishments that can’t even be seen from the freeway, like bacon and
eggs from a restaurant just north of the beer factory, and the
intoxicating, unmistakable aroma of McDonald’s french fries lingering somewhere
between the Victory and Sherman Way exits. These are new scents I’ve
just recently noticed on a daily commute that has been a routine for the
last twelve years, thanks to my recently developed superhuman sense of
smell.

Let’s pretend for a moment that such nonsense is, in fact, nonsense.
But how else can we explain why one might be able to pick up more scents
in an EV than in an ICE vehicle? Bored to tears during one unusually
long commute to work, I decided to play devil’s advocate, and came up
with one word: heat. Tons of it. How much? By my calculation, an ICE
produces over three times the amount of heat per hour than a gas furnace
sized for a 3000 square foot house. After a quick search of the
internet and crunching some numbers, it looks like a 200hp internal
combustion engine wastes about 400,000 BTU of heat per hour, dissipated
mostly through the cooling system and exhaust. This heat escapes around
the car, which probably prevents the surrounding cooler air from
entering the car’s ventilation system without somehow being affected,
perhaps diluted, by the hot air. In comparison, an EV motor produces
such a small amount of heat that it doesn’t even need much of a cooling system,
so ambient air can enter the EV’s ventilation system, scents and all,
undiluted.

Unfortunately this explanation seems slightly more plausible than my
superhuman power theory, which means that in all likelihood I’m still
just a normal guy.